Even though we’re indoor cats, we live in Florida, where it’s warm most of the year. Our seasons are summer with a few months months of not-summer. Cats who live in places where heat waves are less frequent may live in homes without air-conditioning, so knowing how to keep cool can help prevent hyperthermia, especially in kittens and elderly cats.

Make Cool Spots Available

Give your cat access to rooms with cool things they can lay on. Tile floors or ceramic bathtubs, even the back of your toilet are places that your cat may sprawl to feel the cool surface. In our house, we have a sunroom connected to the house by a sliding glass door, and the metal track of the door was a favorite spot for Rhett, one of the cats who came before. His white paws were often smudgy from the grease in the sliding door track where he would sprawl for comfort on hot days.

You can make an extra cool spot in your house by freezing water in a three-quarters full water bottle (leave room for expansion as the water freezes) and wrapping a towel around it. Use this as the opposite of a winter heating pad. Instead, think of it as a cool buddy that your cat can cuddle up to in order to cool off. Don’t forget that this is going to be damp, so you will need to either put it somewhere that won’t be damaged by moisture or protect it from moisture. We like to use incontinence pads to protect things from moisture. They are inexpensive and can be purchased by the case from warehouse stores, and they will let you put things like a towel with an icy water bottle in it anywhere you want without worrying that it will get your furniture wet, since the pad has a plastic backing.

Provide Plenty of Fresh Water

Make sure your cats have plenty of water, and check its level often. Warm weather means they will go through it faster, and it will also evaporate more quickly, meaning that smaller bowls of water will vanish a lot more quickly than you expect. You can add ice cubes to the water to cool it down temporarily, but some cats will fish out ice cubes to play with them, so monitor the bowls the first time you do that, especially if your bowl is in an area that the floor could become slippery when wet from melting ice.

Keep Out the Sun

Close curtains or blinds to prevent sun from further heating rooms in your house where your cat prefers to sleep during the day. This will also help with your air conditioning bill. This may mean less time for your cat to watch the birds and squirrels outside your window, but the birds and squirrels are probably resting in the heat of the day, too.

Southern and western exposure windows are the ones likely to heat up your house the most. Our sunroom has both south and west-facing windows, and we keep them closed for most of the day in the summer to try to keep cool. In the late afternoon, opening the room’s west-facing blinds can make the temperature jump ten degrees in a short period of time, so we just Ashton poke her head through if she wants to see what is going on around that side of the house.

Use Fans to Maximize Circulation

Point a fan where your cat can enjoy the breeze it creates. A fan helps humans cool off by evaporating sweat from your skin, and cats don’t sweat all over the way that humans do. That means that a fan isn’t quite as efficient for helping cool your cat as it is to cool you, but moving air around your cat that is cooler than her body temperature does help to draw heat away. If your cat is willing to let you wet her down with a damp washcloth, this effect works even better, but we won’t let a damp cloth anywhere near us.

Don’t forget that some fans are easier to tip over than others. If your cat is rambunctious or has climbing tendencies, a fan that sits on the floor is a safer choice than one on a tall pedestal that has a higher center of gravity and could be prone to toppling.

Save Strenuous Exercise for the Cooler Hours

You probably go out for your daily jog in the early morning to avoid the sizzling summer heat, and it’s no different for your cat. Don’t encourage strenuous play in the heat of the day. Playtime is important, and it’s great bonding between cat and human, but it can wait until after the house cools down. Or set your alarm a little early in the morning and have extra play time then.

You may regularly play with your cat until he is panting, but panting is also a sign of heat stress. Don’t push your cat’s exercise when it’s hot so that you can’t tell one from the other. And if your cat begins to act unusual after summer exercise, with rapid pulse and breathing, redness in his tongue and mouth, lethargy, or stumbling after a case of the midday zoomies, don’t assume he’ll be fine. Heat exhaustion signs like those need veterinary followup.

Three of the most dreaded words among the animal loving community are pet food recall. No one wants to be the last to know about a recall, but we’re all busy. It’s hard to know how to keep up with recalls, especially when they seem to pop up on Friday evenings at 5pm when we’re occupied with other things, making them slide under our radar until a cat is sick.

Ways to Get Pet Food Recall News Early

Notifications on your Phone from the AVMA

The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) maintains the @AVMARecallWatch Twitter account, which is usually among the earliest sources to report recalls. You can follow them on Twitter and read their updates there. For faster notification, you can set up Twitter to send an SMS message to your account every time there is a tweet posting a recall to that Twitter account. Make sure your phone is set up with Twitter (while logged into Twitter, under the gear menu at the top right of the Twitter site, choose Settings > Mobile). Then, on the @AVMARecallWatch Twitter page, click the gear above their timeline and select Turn on notifications. That’s it. Recall news sent straight to your phone.

Email updates from the FDA

Many people consider the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) to include a complete list of all recalls, but that isn’t true. When questioned about a recall missing from their list last year, they explained via email, “We don’t post all recalls. As our main FDA Recalls page states: ‘FDA works with industry and our state partners to publish press releases and other public notices about recalls that may potentially present a significant or serious risk to the consumer or user of the product. Not all recalls have press releases or are posted on this page.'”

Still, the FDA is a valuable resource for recall information, and you can get notices of new updates to their site via email by visiting the FDA CVM page and clicking the Get e-mail updates when this information changes hyperlink. You will receive emails about recalls posted to the FDA CVM site, as well as other related information, such as drug approvals, policy changes, and grant program requests.

Email Updates from Talkwalker Alerts from around the Web

You can also set up a Talkwalker alert to send you news content related to a topic. this delivers information directly to your email inbox, either daily or as it finds new instances of your search term. One downside of this is that news organizations and others in their haste to get the word out about a recall tend to copy basic recall information and paste it without adding much, if any, content, resulting in getting alerts for the exact same information multiple times from different sources.

What Not to Do

As much as we all love the convenience of the big-box pet food stores, don’t count on them to know the latest on pet food recalls. It isn’t their fault. Notification goes from manufacturers to the corporation and then filters down to the individual stores. This is why you may have heard stories of people going into the stores and finding recalled product still on the shelves the day or two after a recall is announced, especially when the recall happens on a Friday or weekend. That process takes time. Small, specialty pet food retailers tend to get the news faster, if only because the word doesn’t have to filter through extra intermediaries at a corporate level.

Also, don’t rely on a news source on Facebook to bring the news to your attention. Even if a Facebook page posts every recall promptly, the algorithms that determine what displays in your news feed currently penalize pages on Facebook so that it’s not safe to rely on all of their posts showing up in your news feed. Unless you plan to visit a page daily to check for new news, you are probably better off finding another way to bring recall news to your attention so that you don’t miss it.

Finally, don’t panic! Being a knowledgeable consumer is your best defense against learning about a pet food recall the hard way. Using some of the tools available to you to make sure you hear about recalls promptly can help keep your pet healthy.

A Trader Joe’s store just opened in town, and it’s kind of a big deal. Everyone from other parts of the country was advising what foods to buy there, and one of the ones we had recommended was their almond butter. So the head peep braved the parking lot, which was more chaotic than the Disney World parking lots this time of year, to buy some almond butter (and other stuff, too), and she was excited to try it on some toast. Of course, if any peeps are eating something, Ashton has to try it, too.

And she did, stealing a big bite of toast with almond butter on it when the head peep was reading something on the computer.

The problem is that almonds can be toxic for cats. The ASPCA advises against feeding almonds because of their high fat quantities, which can potentially produce pancreatitis, as well as general gastrointestinal upset and vomiting.

More alarming is that bitter almonds (which are not generally available in the US) contain cyanogenic glycosides. These naturally-occurring plant compounds can break down in pets’ stomachs and release hydrogen cyanide, which is toxic to both animals and humans.

So for her own safety, Ashton isn’t going to be getting any more almond butter, and it’s only going to be eaten under supervision. No distracted eating when almonds are involved!

Ashton: Are you and your cat ready for the fourth of July fireworks? I am! Newton is afraid of thunder but I am not afraid thunder or fireworks. Living near theme parks that have fireworks every night has taught me that they aren’t scary. But lots of you don’t live in places where you are used to those kinds of noises.

So while your humans are making potato salad and counting to be sure they have enough hot dogs for tomorrow’s Independence Day cookout, don’t forget that animal shelters around the country are preparing for their busiest day of the year for lost animals. Cats and dogs, afraid of the noise of fireworks, panic and flee. Remember, our hearing is so much better than yours. That’s why you can never open a treat jar without my hearing it. But it also means that fireworks several miles away that don’t sound so loud to you can be really loud and scary to your cat.

I’m may not be afraid of fireworks, but I’m afraid of lots of other things, and I know awful it is to be really scared of things that you can’t get away from. Most cats will try to hide at home from the noise. But some cats can become so afraid that they do things out of character, like breaking through screens on windows or running through open doors in their panic to try to get away from the terrifying noises. That’s dangerous for everyone.

What can you to do be ready for tomorrow night’s fireworks?

Make sure your cat (and dog, if you have one) are indoors before dusk to be sure they aren’t caught outside when the fireworks begin. If you have calming spray or pheromone plug-ins, it’s a good idea to use them in the house to make it a less scary place. Some of the wall plug-ins may take hours for the scent to distribute through the room where they are, so plan ahead.

At nightfall, close the windows and curtains to help muffle the sounds from outdoors, and turn on some soothing music. Be aware of doors and make sure they are securely shut. If you have a lot of people over for a barbecue before the fireworks, it’s not unusual for people to run in and out of the house to go into the kitchen. Make sure external doors shut completely to keep out the noise, and also make sure that anyone who has to enter or exit after dark is aware that they should shouldn’t let four-legged friends follow them outside during the fireworks display.

Have a comforting place to hide when it gets loud. Your humans should know where you like to hide. They shouldn’t try to block you from your favorite spot under the bed or in the closet or make you come out when you don’t want to. I feel much safer in the closet, and it’s OK if you do, too.

Make sure that you have on identification in case you do escape. It’s best to have a microchip, but even if you don’t, a collar with a name and phone number could help you find your way home if you bolt out of the house and become disoriented. (Always make sure that your collar is a breakaway style for safety in case it gets caught.)

With just a little bit of care and preplanning, the fourth of July can be a less scary experience for everyone!

Read Ashton’s Story in Rescued, Volume 2

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There are no veterinarians here. All health-related posts are the result of research and observation, but educational information is not a substitute for visiting your veterinarian. Do not self-diagnose your cat. For more information, see our disclaimer.